Holmes into Challenger: The Dark Investigator

Abstract

Among the earliest adaptors of Sherlock Holmes was Arthur Conan Doyle. One of the reasons why Holmes is such a compelling character is the combination in his person of many of the roles that jostled with one another in the Victorian imagination: scientist and dandy, amateur and professional, conservative and radical, the intuitive and the calculating machine, the incorrigible showman and the anti-social ascetic. This chapter investigates one aspect of the Holmes character, that of the brilliant and ruthless investigator, in single-minded pursuit of his researches regardless of the feelings and indeed interests of other people. This figure is first related to the intellectual and professional climate of his time, and then followed into its more flamboyant embodiment in Conan Doyle’s second modern serial hero, Professor Edward George Challenger. Equally dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and to positivist material explanations, but without the humane anchor of a Watson as companion and biographer, the dark investigator in Challenger pushes tendencies in Sherlock Holmes (and some other researchers, chiefly in the medical tales) into deeper realms of epistemological enquiry, and further into comedy and satire as well as adventure. Like Holmes himself, Challenger is both an avatar of scientific progress in the age of professional expertise, and a much older kind of hero, the Weberian charismatic who exempts himself from the rules that govern others. Conan Doyle was trained in scientific thinking and practice, yet it is quite clear that he was increasingly ambivalent about the nature of the knowledge revolution taking place in his own lifetime, and the licence allowed to those who advanced it: in the investigator characters of Holmes and Challenger, this ambivalence makes its way into popular fiction. Holmes and Watson were almost immediately locked into the formula of their relationship. It is in Challenger that Conan Doyle was able to take his argument about the knowledge revolution further, and into places where Sherlock Holmes could not have gone, in The Lost World, The Land of Mist, and finally “When the World Screamed”.